Common WordPress Troubleshooting Techniques

WordPress is one of the many great tools InMotion Hosting offers to their customers to build dynamically driven websites. At times, you may find yourself having to troubleshoot errors in your WordPress website. Here we'll discuss some basic techniques when troubleshooting some common errors in WordPress.

Disabling your WordPress Plugins

Some plugins may interfere with other plugins and cause your WordPress site not to load correctly. A common troubleshooting technique is to disable all of your WordPress plugins. If this resolves the issue, then you'll want to enable each plugin one by one and test your site until you determine which plugin is causing the issue.

Some problems caused by plugins will prevent you from logging into your dashboard. If you still can log into your dashboard, then navigate to your plugins page and continue to disable all your plugins and test as described above. If you do not have access to your WordPress dashboard, however, you can use an FTP client such as FileZilla to rename your plugins folder (which will disable all of your plugins). Click here for more information on disabling your WordPress plugins.

Disabling your Current Theme and reverting to the Default

Some themes include custom functions that, at times can cause errors. When troubleshooting issues, it is important to determine if the error is related to a theme. To do this, you should change your theme to the default theme in your WordPress installation. This should be one of the first steps you take in troubleshooting errors in WordPress. If your error is resolved by reverting the theme to the default, then you know it's an issue with your chosen theme.

If you have access to the WordPress dashboard this is achieved by going into the themes option on the left side menu pane and activating the default theme. If you do not have WordPress dashboard access, and in some cases with errors this may be true, you can disable your theme by FTP as well. Once you are connected via FTP with an FTP client such as FileZilla, you then will navigate to your themes folder. Rename your current theme and WordPress will automatically revert to the default theme.

Other Common Errors

404 File not found errors: When you see a file not found error, you will see see a full path to the file that is missing. Retrace the path via FTP and see if the file exists. Remember, you are on a linux server so file names are case sensitive. Test.php is not the same file as test.php. 404 errors are commonly associated with permalinks or the coding in the indes or search files as well.

Memory Exhausted errors: This is an error that typically mean you have not allocated enough memory for php to run the desired action. The error message will look similar to this:

This can be corrected by adjusting your memory allocation in your php.ini file. You should have a php.ini file in your default folder where you installed WordPress. If you do not, you can find the file in your public_html folder and copy to the same location as WordPress. Once the file is in it's correct place, you will need to open it up in an editor. You can do this in File Manager in cPanel. Find the line of code that says:

memory_limit = 8M

Now you will need to change it to something like this:

memory_limit = 16M

NOTE: you may need to keep adjusting this number to find out how much memory you need to allocate. If 16M does not work increase the number to 32M.

WordPress showing a blank page: If your WordPress website is showing a blank page, it's typically caused by a php error. If php is configured to hide this error, you'll get a blank page displaying on your website. Please read our article on how to handle blank pages in WordPress